Bob Boyer, R.C.A. (1948-2004)

Bob Boyer, R.C.A. (1948-2004) – Artist Biography

Bob Boyer (1948 - 2004)

Born in 1948, Boyer was a virtual renaissance man in his efforts within the aboriginal community. Through his own work and tireless support of Aboriginal artists, he helped foster the recognition and importance of Aboriginal art in Canada. As head of the Department of Indian Fine Arts and Associated Professor of Indian Art History at the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College, Bob inspired many students through his lectures on Native art and culture.

Boyer is perhaps best known to the gallery-going public for his politically charged blanket paintings, one of which NOW newspaper art critic Deirdre Hanna described in 1994 as “an in-your-face reminder of the devastation wrought among Canada's First Nations and the kind of virtuoso turn that has earned Boyer a place in most of Canada's public collections.”

Since those earlier, angrier days, Boyer had, by his own admission, discovered a kind of spiritual calm and happiness. His recent paintings reflect this in their use of colour, mixed media and graphic elements. The artist's trenchant humour, however, often adds an ironic dimension to his paintings' pleasing decorative quality.

His innovative use of traditional symbols and icons, expressed in a sophisticated contemporary painting style, had brought Bob Boyer to the forefront of Aboriginal image making. His artistry won him important solo shows, including a major 1999 exhibition at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery entitled “Spiritual Landscapes: Recent Paintings by Bob Boyer”.

Past solo exhibitions include a critically acclaimed show at Gallery Gevik and exhibitions at the Mackenzie Art Gallery and the Edmonton Art Gallery. Prestigious group exhibitions include the Museo de Arte Contemoraneo de Monterey show “1492” where he was exhibited alongside Eric Fischl and Jean Michel Basquiat.

Bob Boyer is represented in many museums across Canada including the National Gallery, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, the Museum of Civilization, Calgary's Glenbow Museum, and the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatchewan.

View artist's C.V.

Excerpts from Exhibition Catalogues

Bob Boyer: Spiritual Landscapes
Thunder Bay Art Gallery, Thunder Bay, ON, 1999

Positioning and context are words that are germane to a discussion of the work of artist Bob Boyer. His recent work represents a departure in a number of ways. He has changed the content of his images and the structure of the work itself. As a First Nations artist whose work and politics were interrelated, Boyer has now chosen to withdraw from the political forum. His work is no longer issue-oriented and can no longer be summarily identified as making political statements or taking a particular formal approach, as was the case with his blanket paintings. Boyer's recent work is about the personal and the spiritual and his relationship with his culture on that level. The references to earlier work that remain are elements that are an inherent part of Plains Indian culture and that speak to his heritage and to time spent on the powwow circuit as a dancer.

Boyer came to fresco through his interest in the history of the technical processses associated with the act of applying pigment to a surface. Fresco is a painstaking process but it forced the artist to work more simply, to reduce the complexity of the abstract patterns, the reliance on structure, and allowed him to move away from the blanket series and take artmaking in a new direction. His love of surface texture and colour remain, and the works, regardless of scale, are freer, elemental and immediate. They take the viewer, as the artist intends, to a place of the spirit. Boyer's work is unique.

— Janet Clark, Curator